It’s a curious title and a bit of a mouthful, but John Sayles is exec producing and Sam Elliott has come aboard to star in writer/director Robert Krzykowski’s The Man Who Killed Hitler and then The Bigfoot.

The story follows a legendary American war veteran named Calvin Barr (Elliott) who, decades after serving in WWII and assassinating Adolf Hitler, must now hunt down the fabled Bigfoot. Living a peaceful life in New England, the former veteran is contacted by the FBI and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to lead the charge as the creature is carrying a deadly plague and is hidden deep inside the Canadian wilderness.

Krzykowski will also produce with Lucky McKee, Patrick Ewald and Shaked Berenson. It marks his feature directorial debut (he had directed a short previously). Award-winning indie filmmaker John Sayles is executive producing the feature.

Principal photography is set for August 2017 on the East Coast. Ewald and Berenson’s Epic Pictures is financing the film. Epic Pictures previously produced the horror hit and festival favorite Jeruzalem.

It’s also worth noting that legendary effects wizards Douglas Trumbull and Richard Yuricich (2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blade Runner) will be working on this film with creature team Spectral Motion (Hellboy, Pacific Rim).

Sam Elliott is a formidable actor. If you weren’t convinced by his role as “The Stranger” in THE BIG LEBOWSKI, try the little-known jewel OFF THE MAP, set in Taos County, NM. You will come away convinced.

I don’t dispute for a second that Sam Elliot is a fine actor because he very clearly is. However, not many actors have significant control over the movies in which they appear and even then, there is no guarantee that his or her thespian skills transfer over to screenwriting or producing. Pretty much every actor has been in at least one or two duds – I bet you could find a turd lurking even in Merrill Streep’s filmography. I’m saying that, notwithstanding having a quality actor for the lead role, the storyline on this film seems so odd that it is difficult to imagine that it would turn into a decent movie.

And even if it actually was a decent movie, what are the odds that the movie critics, who are by-and-large representative of mainstream tastes and ideas, would balk at a non-comedic portrayal of bigfoot in a movie (i.e. something other than Harry and the Hendersons) and pan it just because of the subject matter? Pretty good, I’d say, and then your Rotten Tomatoes score drops well under 50%.

Anyone else finding Cryptomundo.com to be tremendously buggy over the past few days? This site is simply not even registering a full third to half of my keystrokes, it is lagging so badly. It took me almost 10 minutes to type these three little paragraphs.